Ashley Scott and Jude Law play personal sex robots for hire in the movie "A.I."Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

NASA casually dismisses alarm over the world ending Dec. 21 by assuring that “credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.”

To doomsayers, the agency says the conclusion of the Mayan calendar is no more dangerous than the arrival of Dec. 31 on your own calendar, which, hangovers and resolutions aside, tends to go off without a hitch.

So, it looks like the skies are not soon going to be the end of us. But hold on, Chicken Little.

What star-searching scientists are missing is that in 2012, right here on Earth, advancements have been made by robots. Machines — which speak the cold, if-then-else language of calculation and consequence — are becoming more human in their programming.

This past summer, Yale’s Justin Hart published details of work which centers on robots learning about their own bodies and senses without such information needing to be programmed into them. His lab won a $10 million award to pursue creation of socially assistive companions for those with special needs.

Hart says he is seeking to emulate forms of self-awareness developed during human infancy. “In particular,” he writes, “We are interested in the ability to reason about the robot’s embodiment and physical capabilities, with the robot building a model of itself through its experiences.”

Hart’s robot, Nico, will essentially grow up, just like you or I, learning about its body — but without having to suffer the awkwardness of puberty.

And if self-awareness isn’t enough to signal times are changing, robots and their programmers have made headway into varied fields that include writing, music, painting, art analysis and even playing video games in a fashion deemed more human than some human competitors.

There are robots that can fly, drive, run, juggle and even pole dance. And some day we’ll have robots that can also have sex. (Hopefully they don’t all resemble Jude Law in the movie “A.I.”)

This all sounds like good news, depending on your idea of a good time. But ever since the word robot was first coined in 1921 by Czech playwright Karel Capek, culture has been awash with cautionary tales of robotic inventions turning against their creators.

If you look in the dictionary, it even says the root of the word comes from the Czech “robota” for compulsory labor, which it also says is akin to the Old High German “arabeit” for trouble.

Trouble.

OK, so self-aware robots may not exactly be the end of the world. But how do we keep out of HAL 9000-esque trouble?

My advice is that we should preoccupy ourselves with programming better people, first. After all, guns don’t kill people; gun-wielding robots kill people because their programmers didn’t imbue them with enough compassion. Or humor.

Just remember what Thom Yorke said during Radiohead’s “OK Computer” era: “I’m not afraid of being taken over by computers … because the thing is, computers cannot resist. You can always smash ’em up, and they’re totally defenseless. All we need are more people with hammers.”